Tehran, Iran – For many Iranians, it already felt like things could hardly get worse only days after 2020 started.
“We wash away blood with more blood. We pile suffering upon suffering. It’s as if history has been compressed,” a group of students at the Amir Kabir University in Tehran said in a statement released in early January.
Less than two months before, protests that erupted across Iran after the price of gasoline tripled overnight were violently quashed, and 230 people died, according to the authorities.
But that student statement was published after the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) mistakenly shot down – with two missiles – a commercial aircraft operated by Ukraine Airlines over Tehran on January 8, 2020.